o, lazarus
by nemesisqueer
Summary: hell is other people
1. graves

The graves are empty.

It is supposed to be a routine mission. A simple search and destroy, with targets who can no longer see him coming, can no longer flee, is a welcome change of pace from his usual assignments. His gut instincts still scream that it's too good to be true. Faced with two empty holes in the ground, he cannot ignore the sinking feeling in his stomach in favor of bittersweet closure.

He hates being right.

 _The news arrives five days earlier in the form of a knock at his sister's door._

 _He is visiting Sayu after a lengthy job, pestering her to see a doctor about some minor injury. He thinks nothing of the knock, thinks nothing of his sister getting up to answer the door. It is not until he recognizes the woman, Akane, by the pattern on her mask, that his ordeal begins._

" _Is your brother here?" she asks, without preamble._

 _He joins his sister in the doorway._

" _A report just came in from Konoha," she says. When his eyebrows draw together, she adds, "it's about some of our rogues. You'll want to hear this." Her voice is heavy with some meaning she won't reveal in front of his sister._

 _Sagasu's throat goes dry._

" _I understand," he says, and leaves with her, putting on his mask as they walk._

 _He tries not to guess what information is waiting for him, although he thinks he already knows. It's his day off, so the report has to contain some information vital to the tracker corps, or even Sagasu specifically, and he tries not to think about what that might mean. Instead, he wonders how Konoha, a village they don't have particularly good history with, could possibly be involved._

 _He finds the rest of the tracker corps waiting for him in the Mizukage's office. Expressionless masks turn to face him. A few give small nods, but no one speaks._

" _Have a seat, Sagasu," the Mizukage offers._

" _No thank you, sir."_

" _Suit yourself." Yagura sighs and leans back in a chair that dwarfs his slender frame. "Momochi Zabuza and Yuki Haku have been reported dead by a Konoha jonin."_

 _Sagasu does not so much as blink in reaction. "I see."_

 _The Mizukage scans the open letter on his desk before continuing. "They were apparently working as mercenaries when the Konoha nin encountered them in a conflict and killed them. He recognized them and reported the incident, and has given us the location of their burial sites. As a gesture of good faith, I assume," he adds dubiously._

 _He looks up and makes eye contact with Sagasu through the mask._

" _Certainly a more dignified ending than traitors could ever hope for," he says._

" _I can make no argument with that, sir."_

" _No, you can't," Yagura agrees. "You'll need to confirm their identities and dispose of the bodies, of course. The sooner, the better. It's been unseasonably cold lately, but I'm sure they're already starting to rot." The room is so silent and so still that it could be empty._

" _Yes, sir," Sagasu says._

" _I'll have a completed draft of the mission sent over to you later today," he says, thumbing through a stack of papers that consists of the missive and two open file folders. His rummaging uncovers soft brown eyes staring out of an old photograph, and he leaves them uncovered. Sagasu can only guess this is by design._

" _The boy was a student of yours, wasn't he?" Yagura asks, but because he knows the answer, he does not wait for a response. "Would you like to enlist any assistance for this task, to ensure it is completed properly?"_

" _That won't be necessary, sir."_

" _You are all dismissed, then."_

 _The silent figures begin to file wordlessly from the room. Sagasu heads for the door as well, but stops short when his Mizukage calls him back._

" _Sagasu?"_

 _He winces._

" _Sir?"_

" _I hope this finally allows you some measure of peace," Yagura says. His voice is even and sympathetic, but his eyes are cold._

" _Yes, sir."_

 _He leaves the Mizukage's office without breaking character. He goes back to his sister's apartment and apologizes for leaving so abruptly, but she tells him she understands that he can't discuss what goes on in tracker corps meetings. They go back to their conversation as if nothing has happened._

 _He leaves before she can invite him to stay for dinner._

 _Alone in his own apartment, Sagasu takes his mask out from underneath his flak jacket and hurls it across the room. He slowly sinks to the floor, one hand pressed over his mouth, and sobs in relief._

But now the graves are empty, because things can never be as straightforward as they seem. If he lets his mind wander, Sagasu can conjure up all kinds of gruesome images—of what happened on the bridge, of what's been done with the bodies. He will not, cannot, allow himself the notion that the graves have been dug out from the inside, although all his training tells him it must be so.

The dead do not walk. The graves are empty, so Sagasu does what he's always done.

He keeps moving.


	2. day one

The bones in his hands feel like ice, brittle and ready to break each time he tears into the earth. It is not deep—five feet of loose dirt, damp and sticky and hellishly cold, soaking through the torn shroud that envelops him. Cold creeps into his lungs, into his skin, into the soft places at the base of his skull, but he does not stop except to flex his fingers when the pain becomes too great.

Lucky, he thinks vaguely as he pushes towards the surface, that the ground above him hasn't frozen. His fingers find purchase in the hard-packed snow, which he pushes aside with the last of his strength.

When he finally sees it, the grey sky brings him no peace.

The grave near his has been marked in haste with old wood and bits of twine. A tattered sash hangs from the marker, bloody and familiar. At his own head, there is nothing—only the soft, sloping indication that something had once been there, leaving a gap the dwindling snowfall has yet to fill.

Zabuza has known cold like this before, back in his youth when food was scarce. Back then, he did what he had to in hope of one more day of life. The way death hangs on him now takes him back to that time, and he shakes and tries to blame the cold. He knows that he's been dead, but he knows, too, that it does him no good to dwell on that thought.

His head swims with white, and he cannot shake the thought that he's lost something out here in the snow. If he could only think, could only remember—

He feels along the ground for more loose earth, the warmth of his hands leaving great gaps in the blanket of snow. He has yet to climb out of his grave, and now he is damp from the waist down, but he has no time or energy to spare on the cold. His hands are still broad and strong, and he pushes past the pain to scoop palm after palm full of loose ice and dirt from the ground beside him.

Fear for his life forced him to claw his way towards the sky, but what drives him now is new and wild. It burns at his throat and grips his heart too tightly in the places where it still feels frozen.

"Did I say you could die?" he growls, to no one in particular.

It is five feet down that he brushes what feels at first like hard ice, and keeps digging. The boy looks as though he's sleeping, dirt scattered across his pale cheeks like dark stars, but his chest is still, his skin cold.

The man sits back and breathes out a curse. He's not sure what he expected.

Then, a cough. He looks back down to see dirt and gore spray from the youth's dry lips. Haku's eyes are dull and dark, half closed to blot out the grey light, but pink blooms across his raw cheeks.

"Sir?" he sputters, and coughs again, spitting up old blood and burial dirt.

Zabuza pulls him up onto solid ground by the front of his tattered shirt and lets him fall to all fours. "You'll breathe easier if you sit up," he says, but the sound is drowned out when Haku retches. After that, the black filth spills out in smaller, looser clumps and the cough slows to an occasional wheeze. His wet, ragged breathing is beginning to steady.

"Here." He pushes the boy upright and tilts his face up to meet the sun. Haku squints and blocks the dim grey light with one hand. Whatever Zabuza is searching for in his heavily lidded eyes, in the vacant set of his face, he does not find. "Stand up."

Haku stands, reluctantly, and stumbles. Zabuza catches him at the elbow.

"You're fine."

It is not a reassurance; it is an order. Haku leans his head against Zabuza's chest and coughs one more time, softly, before regaining his composure. He does not speak.

They walk.

The thick snow has begun to melt, leaving the undergrowth damp but navigable. The sea of white blanketing their loose, shallow graves is already shrinking. In the long shadows of surrounding trees, where the snow is still thick, it crunches and cracks under their sandals.

A day ago, the limbs of the sturdy pines would have provided better footing. Or has it only been a few hours? A week? His body feels empty, as it often does these days, muscles burning with hunger and atrophy. He can barely muster the energy to stand; in his current state, leaping silently, effortlessly, from the branches above is little more than a distant luxury.

Of the two of them, he is clearly the better off. The boy walks ahead of him, swaying like a revenant. Now and then he stumbles, or stops for too long to watch as flurries of ice drift slowly past his vacant face.

He says little.

The forest is sparse. Their footsteps leave heavy prints. On the ground, they will be easy to track; without cover, they will be easy to spot. If anyone is after them—and the man suspects there will be—they'll make for easy targets.

They walk, Haku staggering half-conscious in front of him, and Zabuza wonders if their deaths would have been merciful compared to this.

Soon the snow turns to rain and burns cold where it touches his skin. It leaves deep, shadowy pockets in the remaining snow. To the east, grey clouds grow darker; with no way to tell where the sun is in the sky, he cannot guess if it is closing in on nightfall or if the light, frigid rain will soon turn to heavy storms.

"It smells like lightning," the boy says, and shivers.

As they pass row after row of pine trees, Haku's path begins to straighten. His frequent pauses have all but ceased since the rain began. Once, he stops to cough, shallow and dry—the ghost of the wet, guttural sound from before.

He makes no motion to shelter himself when the rain turns heavy. "What happened, sir? On the bridge?" he asks finally. "I can't remember anything."

Zabuza barely knows himself, except to say that they'd been dead, and that explanation seems absurd. For a long time, he says nothing.

"Sir?"

"Gatô is dead," he says, which isn't a lie. "We're going to take what we can and leave."

"Did you kill him?"

Haku's voice is even and calm, but it frays with anger around the edges. Once, he would have scolded the boy for his tone, but now it is a rare comfort.

Zabuza is a man who needs little comfort, but gets less.

"Yes."

"I thought so," the boy says, and then he is quiet again.

It is not until Haku stumbles again that Zabuza notices the injury on his foot, which to some extent explains his gait. At some point between here and the open ground, he has lost a sandal. They cannot go back for it now.

"Stop," he says. Haku turns to look at him. "You're leaving a trail."

Haku looks over his shoulder at the trail of small footprints, irregularly spaced and dyed with small pools of red. He lifts his foot to examine the gash on the bottom. "The cold," he says. "I didn't notice."

He seems wholly unconcerned.

They have nothing in the way of clean bandages, so they settle for washing the injury as best they can with melted snow.

The fresh blood will make them easier to track, but they do not have the luxury of stopping long enough to try to destroy the evidence. They have to keep moving.

Zabuza carries him on his back the rest of the way. Haku is heavier than he was the last time they did this, all those years ago when he first arrived in Mist, but he is not as heavy as expected. He is not a child anymore, but the years have not been as prosperous as either of them had hoped.

They arrive at the tree and he puts Haku down to survey the damage wrought in the wake of Gatô's death. The building has obviously been stripped of anything of worth, judging by the broken windows and open doors. Haku stares into the open distance, unmoving, and says nothing.

"Come on."

"Yes, sir," the boy says automatically.

On the ramp they discover what has become of at least two other shinobi under Gatô's employment. The remains have been there for a couple of days at least—it is cold enough to obscure how long they've been dead, even to a trained eye. Slick, macabre icicles hang from one corpse's mouth and empty eye socket, and the rain forms dark, heavy trails that snake over their skin and clothes and melt the thin layer of frost. The demon brothers died as they'd lived, quickly and without purpose. As the rain begins to thaw their frozen bodies, they will soon begin to stink.

Haku kicks one corpse absently and they both tumble down from the winding ramp. "I never cared much for them anyway," he says. Zabuza has never seen him so unmoved in the face of death.

Some of the liveliness is beginning to return to him now. His cheeks are flushed with pink in defense from the cold, and his hair clings in inky, dark clumps to the sides of his neck. He is still covered in dirt and old blood, but the rain has washed some of that away. Soaked and bedraggled, with a tattered hole in his faded haori, he looks almost human again.

"No offense intended, of course, sir," he adds. Even his wit seems to be returning, for better or worse.

Zabuza shrugs. "I thought they would be useful," he says. "I've been wrong before."

"So humble." The boy laughs, low and hollow and mean. "That isn't like you. We must have lost spectacularly."

So far, it seems that Haku recalls little to nothing about their battle on the bridge. Good. Let it remain that way. The crackling of birdsong, stiff and artificial, still fills Zabuza's ears in the silence, and the boy's dead smile still haunts him when he closes his eyes.

Quiet thunder rolls in from the east. The storm is too far yet for them to see lightning through the dense trees, but memory provides the image.

The open door hangs crooked on its hinges. Somewhere just out of sight, a quiet rustle alerts them to the presence of movement—probably of an animal, or perhaps just the wind. But one can never be too careful, and Haku's levity dissipates in an instant. He stands between Zabuza and the light breeze, on guard despite having no weapons to defend either of them with.

Zabuza tenses too. Even dead, they are wanted men, and surely someone is looking for them by now. They sweep the place with muscles tightly wound, ready to spring, and do not relax until they ensure it is abandoned.

It is an obvious shelter, but they have nowhere else. Though the hideout no longer has electricity or heat, there are still some scraps of food in the form of dehydrated rations, and the small stash of money they'd hidden beneath the floorboards remains untouched. They move the only bed away from the broken window to a far wall. At least half of it is mostly dry.

The storm falls upon them in full force less than an hour later. Zabuza watches out of the corner of his eye as the boy twists the water from his hair. "We can get some rest while we wait it out," he says. Haku only nods in agreement.

Outside the window, lightning strikes a neighboring tree. Haku screams.


	3. day two

Since he was young, Haku has had a recurring dream where he is walking on the water. It is calm, vast, deep. He cannot turn his head to look around, but he knows there is land somewhere far behind him. The land, the feeling of land, recedes as he walks.

He walks until he is tired and then keeps walking. He has no choice. The ripples of his small footsteps echo across the water unobstructed. When he is too exhausted to force himself onward, his muscles aching, his legs shaking, he stops moving and immediately begins to sink.

It happens slowly, the promise of weightlessness urging him not to fight. The water closes over the top of his head without so much as a sound, and motion is restored to his exhausted limbs. He floats in darkness, drifting downwards, and tilts his head back to look up.

The sun is a pale yellow disk above him, glimmering faintly in the fading ripples where he had once been. Haku realizes it is only when he has given himself to the depths that he can look directly at the sun. As soon as he has this epiphany, he wakes up.

It no longer seems profound sweating in the darkness, listening to Zabuza's even, measured breathing—on the occasions when Zabuza is there at all. Haku goes back to sleep soon enough, and when he wakes the next morning, he remembers only the calm stillness of giving himself over to the water.

He feels no need to share this information with Zabuza, who has made it clear that he puts no stock in the interpretations of dreams. His master has no patience for superstition, being something of a superstition himself.

Tonight, as he sleeps beneath tattered sheets in the gutted hideout, Haku's dream changes.

He walks, as usual.

When he stops walking, he begins to sink, as usual.

But when the water closes over him like a lipless maw, he doesn't just float in peaceful acceptance of his fate. Panic floods his brain and he begins to struggle, to kick, to try and scream, only sinking faster for his efforts. He looks up to find the sun, but the sky has rolled over black and the only direction he can move is down. His lungs burn as the water fills his airways, icy and solid.

He wakes himself up with sputtering, violent coughs that threaten to gag him. Zabuza stares at him, outlined faintly in the dim blue light. Haku struggles out of his clothes to escape the cold sweat gathered on his neck and back, but the bed is still drenched from the rain.

"I'm fine," he says, trying to slow his hitching breath.

Zabuza nods once and goes back to scavenging the hideout for supplies. Haku rolls over, away from the damp side of the mattress, and tries to go back to sleep.

He knows he can't afford to lose any more rest, that they'll be on the move again before long, but he lays awake in the dwindling darkness and strains his memory anyway. He remembers having the dream before, and how peaceful it was then. He remembers waking up on the freezing ground, remembers Zabuza hauling him to his feet. He remembers finding the boy sleeping in the woods, remembers losing his temper, breaking Gatô's arm.

Things start to fall out of sequence when he tries to fill in the gap between Zabuza's recovery and waking up cold and disoriented in the snow. Where did they go that day? Was there something they were supposed to do? He's sure he met the blond boy again, but can't figure out where or when.

Zabuza told him that Gatô is dead now, that the old man beat them to double-crossing each other, so he killed him. That sounds right to Haku, but he still can't remember any details that Zabuza hasn't already filled in. He concludes that they must have lost a fight, and very badly.

He wonders why they aren't talking about it. Zabuza isn't one to dwell on failures, but he still understands the tactical value of analyzing them.

He wonders why he can't remember anything. Normally, he would associate this level of memory loss with a head injury, but the time he's missing should coincide with more serious symptoms like loss of motor function and speech capabilities. He can find no such injury; when he runs his fingers through his hair to check yet again, Haku can't even find a scar.

He wakes in the gray light to the sound of running water. By then, the dream is little more than a hazy memory. Anchored in the dampness by the weight of his heavy limbs, he lays in bed and tries to assess their situation.

Judging by the quality and angle of the light streaming through the broken window, it is already late morning, but Zabuza has not yet come to wake him. He tries not to dwell on what that means. He cannot remember the last time his master afforded him such lenience; their training schedule has always been strict, even when Haku was young and frail. In recent years, training has turned to running long before sunrise dissolves what little cover night affords.

The hideout is in such a state of disrepair that it's hard to believe looters could be responsible for much of the damage. He can smell mildew and the first faint whiffs of rot. Haku knows he has lost time; now the question becomes, how much?

It sounds like Zabuza is in the shower, which means at least the plumbing is working. It is a struggle, every muscle in his body screaming in protest, but he manages to extract himself from the musty bed. The clothes he cast off in the night are nowhere to be found.

His master says nothing when Haku wordlessly joins him in the shower. The water is freezing. He supposes he should have expected as much.

As they shower, Haku vacillates between a vast, hollow nothing populated only by flashes of meaningless detail (muddy water dripping down the back of Zabuza's neck, a bird preening on a windowsill) and a close, tight panic that convinces him something is terribly wrong. If only he could remember _what._

 _They lost a fight._

The thought keeps returning to him, nagging at him, and he forces himself to consider what that might mean. It means _he_ lost a fight, and that means he has failed his master, failed to fulfill his purpose. He knows what happens to tools that are no longer useful.

He almost opens his mouth to press Zabuza for more details—for any shred of information that might determine his fate as a broken tool—when the calm, listless apathy sweeps over him again. Nothing matters save his master's latest orders.

"Finish up in here and get dressed," Zabuza says. "I want Wave as far behind us as possible by sunrise."

And then Haku is alone again, with only the frigid water and his thoughts for company. He washes the black soil out of his hair and combs his cold, clumsy fingers through the tangles, tearing out the worst of the mats like a wild thing until he mostly looks like himself.

He reconsiders his earlier diagnosis. The way his normally deft hands twist and jerk as he grooms himself speak to the sort of injury he is looking for, the sort of injury he cannot find.

He does not know the extent of his injuries, but judging by the way his muscles protest and his nerve endings scream with even small motions, he is lucky to be alive. Alone with that thought, Haku can only wish for another wave of apathy. It does not come.

When he examines his face in the mirror, he finds his eyes bloodshot, the telltale red of a burst blood vessel winding between the veins of one of his sclera.

There are already clothes laid out for him on the dry side of the bed. The old haori fits him too tightly in the shoulders now, and the loose traveling pants hit him too high on his legs, but they will serve. Idly, he wonders what has become of his good clothes, of his tracker mask. Their usual two-man gambit won't work without them.

Zabuza has gathered most of the useful things in the hideout, but he still finds plenty for Haku to do. Search for food. Rest. Drink something. Check that room. These are simple. He can do them quickly and effectively without a single troublesome thought passing through his mind. His body may protest with fatigue, but physical discomfort is nothing to a shinobi.

It is nothing to him.

Somewhere between finding the last of their remaining medical supplies and departing, Zabuza hands him a prepackaged field ration. Haku tears the wrapper open, calculating how many hours of energy he can wring from the meager number of calories and weighing that against the gnawing hunger in the pit of his stomach. He takes a bite.

It is the worst thing he has ever tasted, and he spits it out immediately, resisting the urge to gag. His master stares.

"I think it's gone off," he says, turning the bar over to check the wrapper. "What's today's date?"

Zabuza's brows knit together. "They're fine. I checked them already."

This is all the food they currently have, and he doesn't dare ask for another bar to see if it tastes any less nauseating. He chokes down a bite, and then another. Twice, he nearly throws up.

Haku knows he needs to eat. He tells himself that he only dislikes how the food tastes, that it can't really be spoiled. It doesn't even taste stale. He just can't stand it.

The third time he gags trying to swallow a mouthful of the fibrous bar, tears welling up in the corners of his eyes, Zabuza takes it from his hand. "That's enough."

"I'm fine," says Haku, snatching the bar back. The motion is too quick, too jerky, and he stares at his hand for a moment. "If we're leaving tonight, I'll need all the energy I can get."

Why they are undertaking an exhausting journey before either of them is well—and he can tell that Zabuza, too, is still recovering from whatever has happened—is beyond Haku. He can only guess that the headhunter nin have caught up with them. It is not lightly that his master shows genuine concern.

Zabuza gives him an exasperated look, but says nothing more.

Finally, they are finished canvassing for supplies. They manage to find a few days' worth of food, a suture kit, a pair of empty canteens, and the rudimentary camping supplies they scavenged when they first left Mist more than a year ago. His mask is still nowhere to be found.

Haku does not stop to consider that Zabuza has donned his old uniform, except to notice that the unseasonably warm shirt and gray flak jacket seem to hang on him now in a way they didn't the last time he wore them.

He wants nothing more than to go back to sleep, or at least to lay down, but Zabuza shows no signs of slowing. He hands Haku a pack that is insultingly light, and Haku nearly protests, but even that weight drags on his shoulders. Pain splinters out from an area the size of his palm on the left side of his chest. He rubs it under his clothes, wincing, and finds the skin unmarked.

When they leave the hideout, it is with the understanding that anything left there is lost. Haku has left many places he's called home before, however temporarily, but leaving—especially leaving without answers—is still bittersweet and disorienting.

In the setting sun, the surrounding forest is bright and green from the day's ample rain. The waxing gibbous moon hangs low and orange in the fading daylight. Haku finds himself staring at it as they walk; it looks wrong somehow, but he cannot figure out why.

They reach the bridge as the last fingers of twilight settle just below the horizon.

"Sir? Won't we be seen?" The moon is bright overhead. If anyone spots them, they may as well have targets painted on their backs. The more Haku considers it, the less prepared they seem. "Walking under the bridge would provide more cover—"

Zabuza is already cycling rapidly through the hand signals to deepen the fog already rolling up from the sea below. "You're exhausted," he says with his usual bluntness. "If a tracker _is_ waiting for us, he's just as likely to see us under the bridge as on it. We'll just have to hope that no one expects us to come this way."

Haku bites back the bile rising in his throat. He is slowing his master down, putting his life at risk because of his failure. He says no more, only nods and steels his nerve to take the first step on a bridge he doesn't remember being completed. He half expects it to collapse under their combined weight.

It does not.

Under the cover of night, in a dense fog even they can't see through, the pair leaves the Land of Waves behind them.


	4. day three

Sagasu does not sleep, although he means to.

His original itinerary allows for adequate rest before returning to Mist, and after more than a week of running across water and unfamiliar terrain, he knows he would be better for it. A shinobi is only as good as his preparations allow—that is one of the first lessons he teaches his students when they begin training for the undertaker squad—but now his plans have changed.

He drags the squat table to the opposite wall of his rented room for the third time, dimly aware that the agitation is bringing out his compulsive tendencies. When his grip on the edges begins to turn his knuckles white, Sagasu stops, orders himself to breathe. He exhales slowly and wills himself to review what he knows. His shaking hands begin to steady.

His targets were reported dead roughly two weeks prior. The missive from Leaf didn't specify a date of death, only the location of the burial sites. Sagasu can extrapolate from his own inquiries that the recent shift in power following their employer's death happened sometime before the completion of Wave's Great Naruto Bridge, but that still leaves plenty of room for guess work.

Their deaths, though, are not the mystery at hand. It's the issue of the missing bodies that keeps him awake.

Trackers can trade easily in the currency of information and favors, but no one has anything to sell him. No, they haven't heard of any Mist Village nin up for sale. No, they haven't seen any bodies matching those descriptions. Haku would be no one to them, he knows, but one of the legendary Seven Swordsmen would have everyone talking, or at least passing along rumors.

That leaves him with another possibility to consider. Whoever dug up the bodies possibly knew what they were digging for beforehand, or at least discovered it soon enough, and isn't selling. Whoever it is has decided to keep their mouth shut. They aren't interested in money; they're interested in keeping their research material all to themselves.

When Sagasu thinks of Haku—Haku's body, he corrects himself, nameless, denied any final dignity and being slowly cut apart for use in experimentation—something cold and nauseating opens up inside of him. He puts a hand to his mouth. He can't think about that.

If they're gone, they're gone, and there's fuck all he can do about it.

It's a sorry end to the story, and one that gives him no peace, but at least it will be over with. If he's lucky, Yagura will only strip him of his status and ban him from the tracker corps (though Sagasu has long considered himself an unlucky person). Realistically, he will be sent on a mission that no one expects him to return from, like many other shinobi before him who could no longer prove their worth. There's nothing he can do about that.

It is easier to think about his impending death than a future of years of grief and quiet disgrace, of Yagura's cold smile, of the pity in his sister's eyes. He wonders if his brother would attend his funeral, provided they even held one for him.

Sagasu allows himself a self-aware smile. He would never permit his students or teammates self-pity to this extent. It is not how soldiers behave.

He runs his fingers through his hair several times, a gesture more of nerves than function, and ties it back again. There's nothing more he can accomplish here; moving furniture around won't solidify his facts or give him any leads. The people staying beneath him must be fed up with the near constant scraping of table legs on the wooden floor. He puts on his shoes and leaves.

Outside, the warmth of the afternoon has cooled into humid night. The street vendors have lit their orange and yellow lamps for the weekend market. Sagasu walks aimlessly through the crowded market, alone with the fact that he'll be returning home empty handed. The chatter does nothing to help clear his mind.

The bodies are just not there to be found. Even in death, they evade him. He tells himself he was prepared for this, prepared for the eventuality that he would never see his best student again—the best students in the tracker corps are often the first to die, the victims of hubris or ambition or both. The fact that their graves were robbed is just one final insult to everyone.

He stops in front of a display of round, wire cages containing small birds. The cages are strung with multicolored lights. The vendor appears to be absent. Across the path is a stall stocking brightly colored backpacks embroidered with lifelike animals. Black with a silver dragon, pink with a white rabbit, blue with a grey dog.

He stares at the backpacks without really seeing them. It is such a stark contrast to the dimly lit night markets he went to earlier in the week, when he was more hopeful than he is now.

Behind him, the songbirds chirp and flutter against their wire cages in a vain attempt at freedom.

The lingering sense that he's forgotten something, missed some crucial detail, swells with the surrounding chatter. He picks at the feeling like an ill-formed scab, reviewing trivial conversations he's already written off for scraps of new information. Just like the local law-abiding businesses now selling their wares for the evening, the black market has started to improve with the decentralization of criminal activity in the area, and that means tongues are looser.

Based on everything he's gathered, there's some sort of hideout in the forest outside town where rogue ninja and other miscreants in Gatô's employ frequented. His targets are among that number. If he can't find anything about them dead, Sagasu resolves to at least go back to one of the last places they were alive. Even if there's nothing to be found, he has at least fulfilled his obligation as a tracker to the best of his abilities.

It's all he has left to go on.

With renewed motivation, Sagasu turns on his heel and returns to his room to pack his things.

Finding the hideout proves more difficult than he initially expected.

The piney woods in Wave are dense and deep, nearly untouched by the locals. Sagasu expects to find paths worn by careless travelers (not everyone under Gatô's thumb was once a shinobi), but there are none. He expects traps to deter hapless civilians, but there are none. He expects to find markers to lead or mislead, like crude etchings in trees or bent stakes driven into the sandy soil, but there are none.

Whoever Gatô entrusted with the security of his assets has hidden the place skillfully, for a civilian. After everything he's heard, Sagasu cannot imagine Gatô leaving such a person alive.

What he does find is a trail, cold and sporadic and half washed away by yesterday's rain. The waterlogged prints are shapeless, making it impossible to distinguish if they are human or animal.

They are the best lead he's found so far. Someone—or something—passed by this way in the last 48 hours, in more or less a straight line. With little else to go on, Sagasu pulls a scroll from his pack and unrolls it, then produces a small vial from the pocket of his flak jacket.

For the last three generations, the academy in Mist has held a special entrance ceremony. Prospective students prick their fingertip with a hollow needle and drip some of the blood onto thin strips of special chakra paper, to determine their elemental affinities. It is a rite of passage, a vital step in training the next generation to become part of an elite fighting force.

That the results of these tests are kept, sealed away in airtight containers, is a jealously guarded secret. Their village may have more missing nin than any other, but there's a reason fewer of their rogues survive.

It's a trick he hoped to save—the surrounding chakra will pollute the sample in just three or four uses—but if he loses track of the bodies now, he will likely never catch up. He pulls the stopper from the vial and carefully extracts its contents with long, light tweezers.

The characters flicker to life as soon as he places the sample in the center, pulsing with a grey-green light that makes them appear to shift and strain like dogs pulling at a leash. Sagasu begins the delicate process of charging the scroll with his own chakra—too much and it might return false positives, too little and it will return nothing at all—and watches as the pulsing marks grow and spread and slink off into the gloom of the surrounding forest.

He waits.

It is a long shot. The scroll has a limited radius, and it only takes a few days for trace remains to decompose into the surrounding environment. He is surprised that it brings back any results at all. The characters that return are small and faded to the point of near illegibility, but if he squints, he can just make them out. Blood, blood, blood in a little trail across the paper.

His heart skips a beat. According to the information freshly collected on the scroll, Haku passed through here in something like a straight line recently enough that the rainstorm hasn't washed the blood away completely. Despite the slight meandering, Sagasu's training and instincts tell him he is looking at one half of a set of footprints. There's no bone or tissue, no sloughed off flesh or thick, sticky decay like he would expect from a corpse being dragged through the woods.

And, of course, there's the matter of the blood. After two weeks in the ground, corpses don't bleed. The trail was left by a living person, most likely moving through the woods with a small injury he didn't notice right away. The trail is short, so he must have stopped to bandage it at some point. For his own safety, Sagasu must also assume that his target is not traveling alone.

After taking a moment to orient himself, after the initial rush of excitement passes, Sagasu forces himself to admit that nothing he has found so far can be considered conclusive evidence of anything. The characters on the scroll will fade as their find decomposes, and the rest of his evidence is purely circumstantial. He looks at the scroll again and considers the information from the point of view of someone who isn't him, isn't emotionally compromised.

It doesn't tell him anything he didn't already know. It doesn't answer any questions, only generates new ones.

Still, if he follows the direction of the trail deeper into the woods, he knows he is likely to arrive at his destination. He returns the sample to the vial and pockets it, and with only the bloody footprints to guide him, he keeps moving.

He is here, he knows, because Yagura wants him to be here. No one else in the tracker corps would keep looking for dead people in the middle of the forest. No one else would harbor the impossible suspicion they were still alive. Sympathy for traitors is, it seems, just as dire a crime in the eyes of their leader as treason itself.

Now the only thing he can do to defy the Mizukage is to not break under the stress of the job.

Sagasu smells decay before he sees the hideout, even through his tracker mask, and hopes for the best. Instead, he finds the broken bodies of two chuunin from his village, long-dead and half thawed and rapidly decomposing on the forest floor. The prints he is following are deeper here, the trail straighter, and they lead right up to the winding ramp.

It isn't like his targets to be so careless, and Sagasu once again doubts the information he saw on the scroll. The hideout has clearly been looted; perhaps his technique was faulty and the trail he's followed is that of another of Gatô's henchmen, alive and well and not being cut apart by grave robbers.

The alternative has him walking into an ambush. Sagasu takes that chance, but keeps his guard up as he enters the misaligned doorway.

It is soon obvious that the hideout is empty, but someone has been here. The floor of the shower is still wet, the tile wall caked with half-dried grave dirt. There are deep scratches in the wood floor of one room where something heavy has been dragged across the floor—a bed, it seems, when he follows the tracks. A room that seems to serve as a makeshift kitchen is littered with wrappers from nearly-expired ration bars, enough food for someone Zabuza's size to get back on his feet.

This new evidence is just as circumstantial, just as inconclusive as the information he found in the woods, if not moreso, but Sagasu allows himself to form an image of his targets, alive, making do with what they can find here. He searches high and low for signs of the recent inhabitants' identities. At the bottom of a trash can, he finds several clumps of matted brown hair, still wet. It is long enough that Sagasu makes the obvious assumption.

The fact that there is anything to find at all speaks volumes to their condition.

There is little else of value in the hideout, for him or anyone else, save for a tightly rolled bundle of clothes shoved to the back of a high closet shelf. He recognizes the uniform of Mist's infamous seven swordsmen, littered with holes and stained with dark, stiff blood. He wraps the stained clothing in a pillow case and brings it back to town, on the off chance that any of the organic material is intact enough to help him track his targets. His journey is punctuated with questions and theories.

The clothes seem to confirm that his targets are still alive, though he wonders how they could have survived. He considers the missive from Leaf, considers the motivation their old enemies might have to lie to them.

Or perhaps it's another of the pair's trademark two-man cons, thorough and convincing enough to fool a jounin from Leaf. It's unlikely, but he's doubted them before, and he refuses to lose their trail yet again. It is safest to assume that they are alive and together, and currently trying to put as much distance between themselves and him.

In the relative privacy of the room he's renting, he examines the clothes under closer scrutiny. The tears in the fabric are plentiful and wide, and the bloodstains indicate that the wounds ran deep, but he knows the Demon of the Mist has walked away from worse. Wrapped in the dark fabric are two abandoned forehead protectors and another all-too-familiar uniform.

He holds up the threadbare haori by the shoulders and sees the wall opposite him. It takes a split second to register what he's seeing- a blood soaked hole burned through the front and back panels. It takes another moment to register what that means.

Sagasu finds himself holding irrefutable proof that Yuki Haku is dead.

The most feasible reason that he is now holding this evidence is that Haku is alive.

Chatter from the streets outside, people shuffling down the hallway outside, the creaky shutter tapping against the window, all fall away. Only a faint ringing in his ears remains.

His mind resists solidifying the thought, balks at tying together two sets of completely contradictory information. Everything he knows tells him that both things cannot be true, but everything he's found tells him they must be.

 **Author's Note**

Shoutout to TrollerBear and InfamousStorm/SirPoofsAlot (idk your name on here bby) for helping me get this shipped out. Also to my main squeeze for co-authoring with me, even if she refuses to stoop to my level and get a FFN.

Stay tuned for zombies~!


	5. day eight

Haku wakes before dawn, gasping for breath between coughs. The dim light of early morning paints the rented room in blue-grey shadows, but it is more than enough light for his trained eyes to see by. He draws one shuddering breath after another and tries to force out whatever clings to his bruised lungs, to no avail. Something hot and angry lingers just behind his eyes, a fever or a head injury or worse.

He has woken this way every night since leaving the hideout. Those six long nights seem to span his entire life.

At first, he thinks he is alone. There is no sound, no sign of movement from the floor beside the single bed. Panic he cannot name floods him then; he has only slowed them down these last few days, his weak and useless body endangering their lives yet again. Zabuza has no need for useless things, so perhaps he has finally abandoned Haku to his fate.

Or has the tracker come in the night, taking advantage of their exhaustion, and left Haku alive out of some cruel attempt at mercy? It would be unprofessional at best, and treasonous at worst, but it is not outside the realm of possibility. They both know who Yagura is likely to send after him, although neither will mention him by name.

He lays frozen in forced silence, a thin cough clinging to the back of his throat.

Then a warm body stirs on the futon on the floor and Haku lets out an involuntary sigh. Along with the relief comes guilt—his body is still sluggish and unreliable, and perhaps Zabuza would be better off traveling alone—but he tries to push the thought from his head. If his persistent coughing hasn't woken his master, then perhaps their slow pace was not for his benefit alone.

They need supplies if they are going to make it any further. He tries not to think about words like "sepsis" and "tetanus" because right now, there's nothing he can do about either except wash his wounds out with cold water and hope. The hole in the bottom of his foot is deceptively small, but six days later it still stings when he puts his weight on it.

He tries not to think about that either.

Haku takes his time combing his hair, traitorous hands shaking and threatening to resnag the tangles he has painstakingly teased out. At long last, he looks as presentable as he can hope. He stretches his stiff hips and stands. It is still dark, but the first beams of brilliant sunlight threaten to creep over the distant hills.

"I'm going out," he says softly. His master stirs again, but says nothing. Haku does not stick around long enough to determine if Zabuza is still sleeping or if he doesn't care that he boy is wandering off on his own. He slips a boning knife lifted from the inn's tiny kitchen into his sash and leaves.

He is neither a well-oiled, six-foot-tall machine that radiates killing intent, like Zabuza, nor is he so lean and soft-spoken as to be sinister, like Sagasu. Haku can only hope to look intimidating from behind the uniform of the undertaker squad, and that is gone. Their masks are never for hiding behind—that is one of the first rules of the tracker corps, a lesson prospective hunters learn before all others.

That is not the only rule of Sagasu's that he has broken.

Instead, he invents a story while he walks. Something mundane. He's training under a doctor, the kind who makes house calls to the back door when an interrogation goes sour. The doctor is an older man, strict, unfriendly, who took Haku on only because he owed someone a favor. He drinks too much and has a short fuse. Haku has nimble, steady hands and is good at sutures and predicting drug interactions.

Those are the characters. Now for the hook.

He's made a mistake, maybe he lost or damaged some expensive supplies, and the doctor told him not to come back until he could replace them. He's vulnerable, but someone will come looking for him if he goes missing.

It's a risky gambit, and even riskier alone, but more dangerous still is the chance that they'll be recognized if things go south. Like his fictional doctor, Zabuza has a temper and little patience for deception. Haku is smaller, weaker, more easily underestimated, and his medical expertise is better suited to the task of determining what supplies they need—and what supplies they can afford—if they want to survive on the run.

He ignores the nagging suspicion that he is trying to prove something, to Zabuza or to Sagasu or perhaps to himself. This is how it must be done; their usual two-man con puts his master in more danger than Haku is comfortable with, but they won't last long if all they can do is rub dirt in their wounds.

They are, after all, only as good as their preparations.

Haku plucks an unattended basket from a front step on his way to the market. A simply patterned cloth covers several rice balls and a boiled egg. Someone's breakfast. Haku knows he should eat, especially the valuable protein, but his stomach turns as soon as he smells the steamed rice. He promises himself that he'll eat later. Right now, he'll focus on his task.

The villagers go about their morning routine. They are efficient but still sleepy without the sun to wake them. For a while, Haku only observes, watching for the familiar patterns of the underground. He watches for men who stand with their arms crossed and their backs to the thin wooden walls, stamina flagging at the end of their day.

The search takes longer than he hopes. The sun has nearly risen by the time he spots someone who looks like they are in the know but won't try to kill him on the spot for asking questions. A woman, older than him but younger than Zabuza, with dark hair and tired eyes. He rehearses his story one last before he approaches, but the woman doesn't ask.

"You want the Otojiro brothers, honey," the woman says with an expression Haku doesn't quite understand. "Nobody else around here stocks the kind of thing you're looking for. Not anymore, anyway." She watches him push a lock of hair behind his ear, her eyes following the jerky and unpracticed motion, and sighs.

"They usually haunt the old granary at the edge of town," she says. "You might catch them if you hurry."

The granary is built in the traditional style, raised on sturdy wooden stilts as broad as tree trunks and roofed with thatch. It is in better shape than some of the buildings he's seen in town, but still shows signs of disrepair. In the distance, the strings of lamps that illuminate the marketplace begin to wink out in favor of the rising sun.

He sees the Otojiro brothers before they see him, sitting around a small gas lamp. One of them looks like he is beginning to doze, but his brother prods him awake when he hears Haku approach.

Forcing back crocodile tears, Haku explains his predicament. He knows what he must look like to them: small, alone, vulnerable, with his shaking hands and a dress he should've started to outgrow half a year ago.

"You don't have the money for what we're stocking, sweetheart."

"I have the money," he says. His voice nearly breaks. The part of frightened apprentice comes a little two naturally.

The two men look at each other and barely hide their sneers. The metal chair the dozing one is reclining on creaks as he folds his arms over his chest.

"Then let's see it."

"No," Haku says immediately, "I need to see your supplies first."

"So you can run back and tell your doctor where we're hiding them? Nice try."

These hired thugs would have listened to him without hesitation with mask on. It would have been so simple to trick them. Breathe, he orders himself as his heart rate climbs in frustration.

His left foot jerks without his permission. The two men stare.

"Please," he tries, "You don't have to show me where you keep them. I just need to make sure everything is sterile."

"No weapons."

Haku makes a show of surrendering the knife tucked into his sash.

"Don't try anything cute."

Inside the granary, the man pulls a cardboard box from a freestanding metal shelf and sets it on the ground. Haku notes that his back is turned, his kidneys exposed, but he waits. This hasn't gone south just yet.

He presents a smaller, plastic box that Haku recognizes as a medical field pack refill. Inside are packs of syringes still in their sterile plastic sleeves, next to bottles of drugs with unbroken seals. Packaged gauze. Pre-threaded suture needles. Disposable gloves and butterfly closures. Splints. As far as he can tell, this is a triage kit that's been split up into smaller packs. It should all still be sterile, though.

It's better than he could have hoped for.

"We'll take your money now, unless you feel like giving it to us."

Before the man has finished drawing his closed hand back for a blow, Haku drops beneath it, shifts his weight on the balls of his feet, and pivots to face the same direction as his assailant. He exhales.

He reaches for a small knife strapped to the man's ankle and his arm seizes, that same frustrating problem that has plagued him these past days. Haku manages to get the knife out of its sheath, but his arm jerks again, swinging wide, and he loses his opportunity to hamstring the man.

Focus. Breathe. He moves his left leg back to anchor himself for a forward spring, but his body fails him. His right thigh spasms and he stumbles backwards, still crouched, with only the knife between himself and the Otojiro brothers.

"What the fuck?"

He could flick the knife into an eye, but that still leaves three eyes going after him, and then he'll have no weapon. And if he misses, well. Before he tries anything else, he needs a position that's more defensible than cowering on the floor. He focuses his chakra in his feet and jumps back. That gets him significantly further from both the men and the exit.

They have, by now, probably figured out he's lying. To hell with not being intimidating, he thinks.

"Get out of my way, or I'll kill you," he says.

The man on the left slides a spiked tekko over his knuckles, and the one on the right, the one he stole the knife from, has found another dagger. A brawler and a backstabber.

"Nice try, but we're not going anywhere," says the brawler, adopting a half-trained stance.

"Suit yourself," Haku says.

He knows they're going to rush him. It's all they've ever known. If he tries to duck again, the brawler might call his feint and pin him down. He'll have to dodge without ending up right in the backstabber's path. Most importantly, he needs his fingers to cooperate as he cycles through hand signs. Then all he needs is a few spare seconds and the fight will be his.

The brawler makes the first move, an overconfident man, but the backstabber is faster on his feet. Haku had expected them to work in better tandem. Now he has to dodge the faster opponent without ending up in range of the heavy hitter. The backstabber lunges. Haku pivots again and seizes the man's wrist. He tightens his grip and tries to break it, gritting his teeth as the man gets free.

How long ago was it that he could break a man's arm without a second thought? But Gatô was an old man, and Haku has grown weaker than he realized.

"Strung-out bitch," the man sputters.

He moves aside to let his companion strike at Haku, who does not have time to dodge. Haku turns his body sideways to present a smaller target and catches the blow on his upper arm. Skin and muscle can be stitched back together. It still hurts like hell. He staggers backwards and instinctively applies pressure to his injured arm.

In that moment, Haku realizes that he might not come out the victor of this fight. He knew this was a reckless idea at best, but now it is shaping up to be an extremely bad one. Panic floods his brain—he can almost trace the adrenaline coursing through his body, feels his pupils dilate.

Then, something else happens.

Like all the other moments when he's started to panic about lost time and whatever mysterious injury has stolen his usefulness, the panic is followed by a calm. He no longer feels like a cornered child. He feels fluid, feels like water. He sees the opponents before him and all he knows is to bring them down. He feels like fire that will consume all in its path.

He wonders if this is what it feels like to be Zabuza.

Spires of ice spring up beneath the two men before he registers cycling through the necessary hand seals. The brawler screams as ice splits his right calf. The backstabber is faster on his feet and manages to get away with only superficial cuts.

Haku is acutely aware of the smell of blood. The ice steams from where it touches it. He throws his knife at last, burying it in the brawler's throat as easily as he would blink, and the screaming stops.

The backstabber has his dagger between himself and Haku, and open palm held close to his body, his torso curled inwards defensively. Haku has been trained to watch an opponent's body at all times, but on a whim, he locks eyes with him.

He watches him like a bored cat waiting for its prey to do something interesting.

"What are you?" the man sputters.

No answer comes to mind, so he allows his body to move. He is lighter, faster, and the man's defenses are sloppy from poor training and fear. It is a straightforward matter to let the man strike at him and then get the dagger away. The cut is deeper than he intended, but no matter.

The man takes a step backwards, trying in vain to hold his throat closed. Haku readjusts his grip on the dagger and rends flesh from bone like he is back in the hospital basement in Mist, an anatomy book opened beside him and Sagasu in front of him, showing him where muscle anchors to the skeleton.

He swallows and speaks, feeling better than he has in a long time.


End file.
